Podcast Hackathon

We wrote, recorded and edited podcasts in the perspective of different characters from the book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (ATDPTI) by Sherman Alexie. This deepened our understanding of ATDPTI because we were able to get a better sense of the other characters through their voice. It made us really think about what that character was doing or thinking in a part where they weren't necessarily the main focus. It made us ask, "How did this effect our character?" While making this podcast, I learned to take advantage of the sound and noise around you and get into character. We had to change up our voices for different characters to really establish that they were different.

Character Sheet: Mary Spirit

The purpose of the character sheets was to re-connect ourselves with who Mary was and to gather ideas from her few appearances in the book. I was mostly in charge of thinking of different places to record that would make sense for a specific scene. When I was thinking of places, I tried picturing myself in that position and visualizing everything around me. In addition, everything in purple is what I contributed to this document.

​Most of our ideas presented in the character sheet made it into our script. I think this is mainly because Mary was sort of a side character that we never met, so we took every ounce of information we could find.

Script: Mary Spirit

Our group approached the script by each member taking a chunk to write. For the most part, we all wrote one scene. I wrote Scene 1 and a part of the last scene. I was also able to find the exact letter from the book and paste it into our document. For the first few scenes, we made up scenarios that happened earlier on in her life from stories and details shared by Junior's conversations and experiences. For the middle scenes, we actually used multiple quotes from the book from Mary's letter and e-mail to Junior about moving and finding a job. And towards the end, we made up dialogue between made-up characters to see her death.

While we were writing, we were thinking about ways that we could record with background noise to make it feel more realistic. We banged mugs together for the party scene, stomped on the ground when Mary's mom came down the basement, played an audio of ambulance sirens when Mary's trailer burned down and actually called and recorded my voice on speaker phone when Mary got the call that she didn't get a job. These are only a handful of the things we did for the audio to sound more realistic. Some of these things we had visions for as we were writing the script and some pooped into our head as we were recording.

Scrum Board

The scrum board was a way for our group to stay organized and also to be aware of what we have done and we still need to do. On Day 1 of the Podcast Hackathon, we wrote down everything we knew we had to and throughout the three days added to the board when we needed to. When we would finish a task we would move the sticky note.

The scrum board was helpful because it made us accountable for what we got done that day. It also motivated us. Just the idea of not having anything in the "To do" column was a motivation to keep woking. However at times, I do admit that we didn't use the scrum board to it's full potential. We would often forget to add things to it and our sticky notes had very vague things to do, which made them very big things.

Final Audio Diary: Mary Spirit

To create this final podcast, we used a mixture of a professional microphone, a hand held recorder and and an iPhone. We edited the audio on a software called Audacity. We recorded Mary getting a job application at our local Vons, we recorded outside when she writes the letter to Junior and also when the firemen explains what happened to Mary and we recorded in Dr. P's quiet office for when Mary is in the basement, in the middle of the night, starting her podcast about her life. We decided that Rebecca should be Mary because she had a natural voice for her. Her voice was carefree and resembled what we all thought Mary's voice sounded like. Ashley had a good yelling voice so we decided she would be the mom. Alejandro was the only male in our group and we used his voice as the firemen and we used my voice as Sally the manager and the drunk guy at the party.

We were introduced to a lot of new things to make our podcast and some things were definitely more difficult than others. At one point, we thought we had lost all of our recordings on the hand held recorder and we couldn't find them. The program we used to edit was very complicated and difficult to understand, and we accidentally deleted pieces of audio many times. But in spite of all these setbacks we were still able to make our podcast! It was actually really fun making it, one memorable moment was when we we were in In n Out, recording the scene at the party, because In n Out is very loud, and I had to be the drunk guy. We could not stop laughing and we recorded that clip at least ten times.